After God

Nietzsche believed in limitless possibility. The world knew better.

In the fall of 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche proudly informed an admirer that he had completed “a ruthless attack on the crucified Christ.” Long experience as both a soldier and a psychologist had taught him, he said, to bring the heavy guns of argument into action. “I swear to you,” he added, “we shall have the whole world in convulsions. I am a fate.” The frail author of this dire prediction collapsed in a Turin street just a few weeks later, after throwing his arms around a carriage horse to prevent the poor beast from being whipped. He was carried back to his hotel, where he began to shout and sing senselessly; he did not recover his reason again. Of the eleven books that Nietzsche had published before this abrupt end, at the age of forty-four, hardly more than five hundred copies had been sold in all. He lived on for more than a decade, empty-eyed and silent, entirely unaware of the readership that was beginning to spread like fire along the gunpowder trail he had laid from book to book. When the world convulsions began, in 1914, his works were often credited for what one English bookseller termed the “Euro-Nietzschean War,”referring both to the war's outbreak and to the stunning brutality with which it was being fought. The Austrian Archduke had been assassinated by young Serbian militants spouting Nietzschean slogans in support of their national will to power. Copies of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche's most famous book, had been distributed to German troops in a durable military edition; in rucksacks all along the killing fields, it lay beside the Bible it had been meant to replace.

Hitler wouldn't have needed to read anything that Nietzsche wrote in order to assert a version of the “Nietzschean” ideas that were claimed by virtually every extreme of German political culture in the decades after the First World War. By the early twenties, crusaders for left-wing causes ranging from socialism to feminism had found in Nietzsche a thrilling incitement to “push whatever is falling,” as he put it, and young people from conservative families who were discovered with his books were reportedly locked up with a priest for months. Then, as postwar crises propelled Germany ever farther to the right and into policies of racist hatred, readers increasingly drew a different sort of inspiration from the same books—sometimes from the same phrases. Notions of the “will to power” and the Übermensch, burdened with meanings never intended by an author who reserved his greatest contempt for anti-Semites, made Nietzsche the philosopher king of the Nazi state.

Perhaps it was simply “the clumsiest of all misunderstandings,” as Thomas Mann wrote in 1947, that the works of this politically naïve and wholly spiritual figure somehow justified the Nazi assault on civilization. But Nietzsche had always insisted that reading, like writing, should be an act of self-creation: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil.” Thanks to his scornful rejection of systematic thinking and a style that makes substantial use of irony, ellipsis, and the riddling wisdom of a Shakespearean clown, his books have notoriously meant what his readers have wanted them to mean. In recent decades, there have been as many Nietzsches as there have been intellectual movements: existentialist, deconstructionist, postmodernist. And yet even those offering the most recondite reconsiderations—Heidegger, for supreme example, or Derrida—have been forced to acknowledge the tormenting historical questions that inevitably drag the most tragic figure of modern thought back down to earth. As Derrida notes of the Nazis' use of Nietzsche, “One can't falsify just anything.”

Rüdiger Safranski's new book, “Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography,” translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Norton; $29.95), was originally published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the philosopher's death, in August, 2000. A landmark volume almost by definition, Safranski's work, which devotes a great deal of attention to Nietzsche's passion for music, is initially striking less for what the author has to say than for what he has chosen to leave out. Although he ably explores the anti-democratic aspects of Nietzsche's thought, its political uses and abuses after the philosopher's death are treated solely in an epilogue, where Safranski also confines his only consideration of Nietzsche's published writings about the Jews. These priorities do not necessarily constitute defects. Much has already been written about the subjects slighted here, and Safranski's book is, after all, about a philosophy, not its consequences. Yet his silences loom large in a work addressed to the general reader, and make one question whether it will ever be possible for Nietzsche to be released from the history that he inherited and helped to shape. Even now, Nietzsche remains something of a fate, demanding of his readers the courage to face the crises of his epoch, in which mankind first discovered itself alone in a godforsaken world.

The death of God was announced by a madman entering a marketplace, carrying a lantern in the morning light, in Nietzsche's book “The Gay Science,” published in 1882. The moment for such an announcement was already late: Darwin had published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, and even that pivotal work had only given the imprimatur of science to a rationalist culture that had been predicting God's demise for decades. Nietzsche's announcement was far less remarkable than the shattering drama with which it was made, and the fact that a man so clearly imbued with faith was making it.

Born in rural Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, and as a child he was so pious that he was called “the little pastor” himself. His adored father died before his fifth birthday—of a mental illness diagnosed as “softening of the brain,” suggesting untold harrowing scenes—and his two-year-old brother died a short while afterward. The young Nietzsche's anguish and fear may be measured by a dream that, as an adolescent, he claimed he'd had the night before his brother's death, a dream in which a funeral organ boomed deafeningly as his father rose up from the grave, hurried into a church, and carried a small child back to the grave in his arms; it was only when the earth had closed over them both, Nietzsche recalled, that the dreadful music stopped, and he awoke. An uneasy survivor and the only man of the house, Nietzsche grew up in a tight circle of devout women—mother, sister, grandmother, two maiden aunts—and was subject to a more than usually personal ideal of God the Father.

It was not until he was twenty and away at the University of Bonn, in 1865, that he read David Friedrich Strauss's influential study “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined,” a historical analysis of the New Testament that systematically destroyed any shred of credibility in the miraculous aspects of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. When Nietzsche came home that Easter, he made his mother cry by refusing to take Communion. For him, however, the refusal marked a spiritual transformation rather than a desolating break: if one set of beliefs was fading, there were others to take its place.

Throughout the preceding century, as the tenets of Christianity grew harder to maintain, contemporary Germans had begun to practice their own new religion of Greek art and myth. New gods meant, above all, new human ideals to be worshipped. The residents of Olympus had initially been revived and reinvigorated by a Prussian cobbler's son, Johann Winckelmann, who had taught himself to pray in Homeric quotations and founded the discipline of classical art history without ever setting foot in Greece. It was from the realm of imaginative desire that Winckelmann drew the ideals of sunny health and nakedly uninhibited joyousness which “ancient Greeks” held out for generations of German thinkers oppressed by cold weather, bourgeois morality, and heavy woollen clothing.

Nietzsche's education in classics had been rigorous, and his conversion was soon complete; he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. Yet for all his aptitude he was hardly a natural academic, and debilitating headaches enforced the habits of a destined, if unwilling, recluse. His few friendships with schoolmates and colleagues were almost erotically intense, but even the closest were thwarted by his inability to adapt to the vicissitudes of ordinary life: changing tastes, emotional competition, the troubling tendency of the clever men he knew to acquire dullish wives. In his life almost as much as in his work, he quickly set himself apart.

Even as a young professor, Nietzsche, like all great Romantic Hellenists—Byron, Hölderlin, Winckelmann himself—pursued the Greek ideal less for its archeological interest than as a critique of the present and a dream for the future. He scorned the prevailing view of Greek “sweetness and light” (as Matthew Arnold, rather nauseatingly, translated Winckelmann)—what individual, what culture, has known unadulterated ease and happiness?—yet his own dark view was no less a rebuke to the detested bourgeoisie. The most audacious aspect of Nietzsche's Hellenism, however, was his conviction that the highest achievement of the Greeks was within immediate grasp, and had been reborn in the work of a god of his personal acquaintance: Richard Wagner.

Music was a surprising answer to the question of Greek renewal. After decades of artists drawing headless marble torsos in the vain hope of receiving the antique spark, how was an art that had left almost no trace supposed to coax the Muses back? Nietzsche was himself an amateur pianist and composer: the kind of worshipful outsider for whom music seemed, as Safranski notes, the “authentic reality and colossal power,” far beyond anything that mere life could offer. In 1865, Nietzsche came across a volume by Schopenhauer in a secondhand shop and discovered that music is, philosophically, the authentic reality—not an ornament to life but life itself, released like a spirit from the body and hanging pure and exposed in the vibrating air. At a concert in 1868, he heard the overtures to “Die Meistersinger” and “Tristan und Isolde” and felt that he had looked the spirit in the face. Later that year, his enthusiasm won him an invitation to meet Wagner, who quickly saw that the young professor's abilities might be used to glorify his work. (Schopenhauer, to whom Wagner had sent a libretto of “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” stubbornly continued to hear the spirit only when listening to Mozart and Rossini.) Over the next four years, Nietzsche was a guest of the Wagners at their villa in Switzerland two dozen times. For Nietzsche, the older man seemed to offer everything that had been missing from his life: a father, a god, and eventually a place to worship—the new theatre being planned for Bayreuth. With his wife, Cosima, and their precocious son, Siegfried, Wagner also offered Nietzsche a home in which he felt that he spiritually belonged; the beloved disciple even had his own room.

The result was “The Birth of Tragedy,” published in 1872, a book that redefined the creative impulse itself: art, Nietzsche wrote, was passionate suffering reshaped by craft. Using myth to stand for human drives and needs, much as Freud would later do, Nietzsche wrote that passion and suffering derived from Dionysus, god of wine and sensuality and the dark unconscious states that these inspired; the ability to give these feelings form was a gift of Apollo, god of cool white marble sculpture, clean lines, and willed illusion. In a culture that held out no promises beyond death, Dionysus offered access to the truth of our existence; Apollo suggested how one might find a way to bear it.

Elaborating on a single line in Aristotle's “Poetics,” Nietzsche proposed that the theatre of Aeschylus and Sophocles had originated in the wild, orgiastic rites of Dionysus, the memory of which was preserved, in earliest times, by a chorus performing alone. By means of chant and song and rhythmic frenzy, the audience was transported to a state of religious ecstasy. Wholeness, a sense of merging into the mass of humankind, “each person not only united, reconciled, and blended with another,” Nietzsche wrote, “but altogether fused”: these feelings remained after the first speaking actors had emerged to tell their stories, and they remained when the stories ended, as they inevitably did, in annihilation. The experience of music, continuing in the chorus, made the tragic end of every life endurable, by drawing every individual into the current of life which flows through and beyond the single, finite self. Twenty-three hundred years after the end of the epoch of Greek tragic theatre, Nietzsche wrote of the experience as though it were his own. And it was. His description, part sensual rapture and part spiritual consolation, was exactly parallel to his description of hearing the music of Wagner, which he discussed with equal fervor in the final sections of his book.

The reaction was outrage. All rhapsody and no footnotes, “The Birth of Tragedy” was about as scholarly as a Dionysian rite, and one critic suggested that the author was free to gather tigers and panthers at his knees but that he should leave German students alone. Nietzsche's classes were, in fact, soon nearly deserted. He was twenty-seven at the time of publication, and he later described this first effort as having been “constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences.” Safranski, however, places “The Birth of Tragedy” at the core of Nietzsche's work, emphasizing not only his ties to music but the broad and dangerous ties between the worship of art and the fear of democratic politics, or even of social progress—an area in which Safranski balances insights into the subtleties of Nietzsche's thought against an unswerving condemnation of its implications.

Safranski has previously honed his analytic skills in a richly imagined biography of Schopenhauer and a dispassionate study of Heidegger. He is most impressive when following an argument from side to side, and here he works conscientiously down to the substrata, until Nietzsche's apparently blithe praise of Greek slavery, for example, is revealed to be a result not merely of willful aesthetic priorities (or of the pleasure of shocking us) but of his recognition that the price an advanced civilization demands in sweat had hardly changed since ancient times, although it went by sweeter names; and there was nothing Nietzsche hated more than sweeter names. Add the fact that he believed a work of art to be worth any amount of sweat, and that art was actually enriched by taking the guilt of its inevitable social cost into account, and the argument comes around to the point where cruelty and honesty stand staring face to face.

But perhaps the cruellest detail in Safranski's account of Nietzsche relates to the figure of Socrates, whom Nietzsche famously accused, in “The Birth of Tragedy,” of single-handedly destroying the reign of tragic art in order to cultivate reason; it was through the influence of Socrates, of course, that Plato banned all poets from the republic. Safranski reveals that in an earlier manuscript for a public lecture Nietzsche openly identified such aesthetically destructive “Socratism” with “the current Jewish press,” which Wagner believed stood in his way. Safranski's inclusion of this incident seems misleading, and almost unjust, in a book that discusses Nietzsche's emphatic aversion to anti-Semitism only in two pages toward the end. Yet perhaps no other detail of Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner suggests how far Nietzsche was willing to debase himself for the sake of the musical ecstasy he described, and how hard it must have been, finally, to let it go.

Few could have lived up to Nietzsche's expectations of his idol, but Wagner proved to be a particularly brutal disappointment. His pettiness, his unremitting anti-Semitism, and the pomp and pretension of Bayreuth—which turned out to be not the redemption of a vulgar era, as Nietzsche had hoped, but its epitome—all contributed to the eventual break. There were certain early signs of disaffection: sudden desperate maladies would force Nietzsche to cancel scheduled visits, and once, in 1874, he brought along a score by Brahms—no more deliberate provocation can be imagined—which he performed for the Wagners with what can only have been malicious glee. (“Richard gets quite angry,” Cosima Wagner noted in her journal.) And then, in 1878, Nietzsche published “Human, All Too Human,” a seriously witty book à la Voltaire in which he declared the French to be the true heirs of the Greeks and music to be, in and of itself, without meaning. Only the long association between music and poetry had taught us to connect feelings with sounds, he wrote; music is ourselves reflected, and nothing more. (“Evil has triumphed here,” Cosima wrote this time.) With the book's appearance, the relationship was essentially over. Safranski astutely notes that all of Nietzsche's subsequent philosophy “was an endeavor to cling to life even when the music stopped.” Yet Nietzsche's worship of Wagner's genius was never more than a spiritual detour, a replication in sound of the transcendent faith that he had lost: a last communion. And all gods had to die if man was ever to be free.

“Individuals and generations can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness and a trifling with Heaven and Hell. We may experiment with ourselves!” Nietzsche wrote this edict of dizzying freedom while living in Genoa in 1880, a year after ill health had forced him to quit his professorship and retire on a minimal pension. Released from the burden of teaching, he travelled in search of comfort for a devastating array of symptoms: migraines that went on for days, eye pain, semi-blindness, stomach cramps, vomiting blood—symptoms that seem to have combined the psychosomatic with what are generally assumed to be the developing stages of syphilis. In between bouts of pain, however, he was in the giddy high spirits of a man newly sprung from a prison of thought. “The Gay Science,” begun the following year, is a jubilant book, in spite of the ferocious accusation of the madman in the marketplace, who tells a laughing, careless crowd that he has been looking everywhere for God:

“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? . . . Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?”

It is the crowd's own loss of belief that has resulted in the crime that Nietzsche, even in the sickening thrill of liberation, calls the murder of the “holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed.” But the murderers only stare in blank astonishment at this terrifying speech; God has been killed with the scalpels of rationalism and science, and these complacent fools do not yet realize that they have lost the moral basis of their lives. Without the rewards of Heaven or the threats of Hell, without divine example and guidance, what would man not be free to do? Of course, many earlier philosophers and poets and novelists, from Kant to Dostoyevsky to George Eliot, had understood full well this chilling logic, and had sought to forestall the moral consequences of the age's great collapse of faith. (Emily Dickinson fit both the problem and the only known solution into four lines: “The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small— / Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all.”) But what made Nietzsche so radically different from these figures was his reckless welcome of the newly configured universe, the bold beauty of his call to fellow “aeronauts of the spirit” to soar into the suddenly open distance, where the horizon had been wiped away.

For the rest of his thinking life, Nietzsche strove to sustain belief in the possibility of the flight; that is, in a new future for humanity. He derided the cowardice of the “little bluestocking” George Eliot, who had forsaken the Christian church but who nevertheless insisted—typical of the English!—that Christian morality must be preserved for the sake of society. But why should a society based on lies be protected? Why can't we live with the truth? After the worldly convulsions that man's understanding of his new rights and dominion would bring—events that took no certain shape in Nietzsche's mind—a new type of being would emerge, he announced, as superior to men today as men are to apes. Nietzsche's Übermensch, that Frankenstein's monster of the twentieth century, is never physically described, apart from possessing the robust good health that his creator coveted. He was meant to be, simply, the man who was able to live without religious solace, supported by faith in himself alone.

In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” the prophet descends from his mountain retreat to awaken the world to its new salvation. Nietzsche probably would have written a similar book if he hadn't fallen in love with Lou von Salomé in the spring of 1882. It might not have been so angry, so tortured, so furiously lonely. But it would have been, just the same, the declaration of a new religion—the kind, as Salomé confided to a friend that summer, that “recruits heroes as its disciples.” Nietzsche clearly meant her to be the first.

Twenty-one years old, beautiful, and brilliant, Salomé was—like Nietzsche himself, at thirty-seven—a rather innocent self-declared immoralist. Nietzsche was introduced to her by his closest friend, Paul Rée, at St. Peter's in Rome. They spent a few idyllic days travelling together in Italy, taking mountain walks and talking about God. This was enough time for Nietzsche to propose, and he did so again before breaking off the relationship later that year, as a result of his jealous sister's malicious interference. Sick with rage, he had become convinced that Salomé had emotionally betrayed him—with Rée, with whom he also broke. “If I cannot perform the alchemist's trick of turning this filth into gold,” he wrote in December, “I am lost.” The following month, he began “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” the book that helped set the world to war. He called it “a bulwark against the unendurable.”

How much does the life affect the work? The ancient knot is particularly difficult to untie in the case of Nietzsche, who claimed that every philosophy is “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary unconscious memoir.” The impetus that suffering gives to genius—that great, derided romantic cliché—seems to have been the personal confession and unconscious memoir in Nietzsche's own work, from the very beginning. But everyone suffers; genius remains the mystery. How much does it matter to “The Gay Science” that Nietzsche's father's death so devastatingly preceded God's? To “The Birth of Tragedy” that Wagner and Nietzsche's father were born in the same year? Or that his childhood nightmare was filled with deafening music? Safranski introduces another possible source of suffering, which raises questions of its own, in his forthright reference to Nietzsche's “latent homosexuality.”

The subject is not new. Although evidence of Nietzsche's homosexuality has been strenuously disputed by earlier biographers, many have speculated on the nature of his attachment to Salomé, since neither seemed to manifest any overt erotic interest in the other. Rumors existed in Nietzsche's own lifetime, and the Nietzsche-obsessed circle around Freud considered Nietzsche's homosexuality common knowledge. Freud reported having heard from Jung, whose uncle was a physician in the clinic in which Nietzsche was confined after his final collapse, that Nietzsche confessed to having been infected with syphilis while visiting a homosexual brothel, although Freud warned that neither the story nor Nietzsche's state of mind was to be trusted. (At the time, Nietzsche was also claiming to be Christ and Dionysus and Cosima Wagner's husband.) Freud, who believed that Nietzsche achieved greater introspective insight than anyone ever known, nevertheless concluded that he could not be analyzed because he remained a sexual mystery. This staggering contradiction, coming from the master theorist of the sexual roots of the inner life, may at least suggest one reason for the circling evasions that have made Nietzsche so impossible to pin down; it may suggest a reason, too, for the tragic sense that only darkened as he grew older, in response to the utter loneliness that overtook his life.

Perhaps, after all, he had really been in love with Rée, and loving Salomé—as at times he'd given the impression of loving Cosima Wagner—was his only means of expressing his desire. “The degree and kind of a man's sexuality,” Nietzsche wrote not long after these events, “reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.” When considering his own spirit, was this most introspectively insightful man deceiving or deceived? We may never know, but whatever Salomé meant to Nietzsche as a woman, as an intellectual and spiritual companion she seems to have been his last chance to believe that he might not spend his life alone. The sonorous figure of Zarathustra, forty-year-old sage and teacher, does a great deal of talking to himself: “comforting his heart with hard maxims,” as Nietzsche puts it, “for his heart was sore as never before.”

It is an incredible fact that these “hard maxims”—directives to the self to have courage, seek out the enemy, obtain victory, and love the war—were taken as literal directives by whole nations. “Zarathustra” is written in a uniquely mannered combination of Biblical oratory and playfulness: St. Paul meets Lewis Carroll. Today, it is hard to imagine that Nietzsche meant anything in it literally, including the notion of war. He took delight in exaggerating his own military experience: he had actually completed a year of peacetime service, and during the Franco-Prussian War he had spent two weeks at the front, nursing wounded soldiers, before being sent home with diphtheria and dysentery; Cosima Wagner had warned that he would do more good if he sent cigars. But in “Zarathustra” war is a personal matter: a cry for bravery in defeat of inner weakness, delivered with the wild bravado of a man who felt that no one was listening, even though he proposed to save the human race from consuming aimlessness and despair.

Jesus had died too young. Had he lived to maturity, Nietzsche argued in “Zarathustra,” he would have outgrown his contempt for the earth and the body, his hunger for transcendence, and settled down. Throughout the rest of his work, Nietzsche catalogued the damage done to man by the immature demands of Christianity, and devised ways that a riper faith might take its place. One doctrine, above all, promised to make this possible. The central tenet of Nietzsche's religion of heroes, the idea that had hit him as the light had hit St. Paul, was the “eternal recurrence”: understand it, he wrote, believe it, and you will change your life.

Few have understood it; fewer have believed it, and for good reason. What would you think, Nietzsche asks, if a demon were to creep after you and say: Every day that you have lived, every moment, has been inscribed in time in such a way that it will recur, over and over, in an endless cycle, with no change possible and no way out. For Nietzsche himself, regarding his own life, the thought was an agony of pain and regret and shame. To have to listen to his mother and sister again! Who could bear those unbearable others; worse, who could bear oneself? Only a person who had lived an extraordinarily noble and healthy life, he answered—only an Übermensch, understood as one who overcomes the rancor and resentments that lead us to squander our days. Part child of Darwin and part mystic, Nietzsche searched for mathematical proof that time and space might actually intersect to make the “eternal recurrence” possible. The concept is, as Nietzsche well knew, as fantastical as that of a Heaven we have never seen. And yet if men were to believe even in its possibility—as in the celestial kingdom—they would strive to make the demon's curse a source of joy: the “eternal recurrence” was so crucial to Nietzsche because it was designed to create just those superior beings who would greet it happily, and who would replace ideals of Heaven with ideals of earth.

It would be a very different sort of earth, no longer the province of the priests. It was through their influence, Nietzsche railed, that man had become a sickly animal, trapped in a civilization that sapped his sex and strength; the time had come for man to reclaim his instincts and redeem his rights. Do not believe what almost two thousand years of history have taught you to call evil, he counselled, nor what you have been assured are virtues—humility, meekness, poverty, altruism—because these concepts have been purposefully reversed. The Greeks knew better: goodness for them was nobility, pride, victory, power. The overturning of these values was the work of a brilliant people enslaved: a people who had lost all worldly power and had managed to convince the world—astonishing feat!—that power itself and the desire for power were evil, that everything a slave could not attain was not worth attaining, that the meek would inherit the earth. It was the Jews who had perpetrated this extraordinary scheme, by inventing Christianity.

Nietzsche was furious when some of his ideas caused the rising anti-Semitic press to take him for a supporter. After his break with Wagner, he was consistently outspoken in his praise of contemporary Jewry (“the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe”) and in his belief in the benefits of mixing races and of Jewish assimilation in Germany—the benefits to Germans. In “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), he wrote that, rather than expel the Jews, “it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country.” He was anything but a nationalist; by the turn of the century, his ideal of a citizenry of “good Europeans,” transcending all origins, was attracting adherents—among them many Jews—eager to escape the shackles of history and forge their own fates. Nietzsche himself, upon leaving his professorship in Basel, could not bear to go back to Germany; after nearly a decade of travels he returned home only as a blasted, empty shell, when his mother took him out of the clinic, in 1890, offering her gratitude “to our dear, good God that I can now care for this child of my heart.”

From his mother's abdication of control, in 1895, up through the rise of National Socialism, Nietzsche's estate—his books, papers, unpublished writings—was owned by his sister Elisabeth, as unsavory and unscrupulous a character as ever impinged on literary history. A particularly vicious anti-Semite (“There can be no reconciliation between a vindictive anti-Semitic goose and me,” Nietzsche wrote after an argument with her in 1884), she was responsible for holding back some of her brother's works (including the letter just quoted) and reëditing others, for publishing his scattered notes in an arrangement titled “The Will to Power”—once something of a Nazi sourcebook, now officially returned to the status of scattered notes—and, finally, for welcoming Hitler to the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar in 1934. (The Führer stopped by on his way to Bayreuth.) It is easy and in many ways correct to place the blame for the “Nazification” of Nietzsche's work on her shoulders; she would have been proud to bear it.

Yet the issue of Nietzsche's responsibility isn't quite so easy. Many of the terms he used, from “power” to “the good,” are accorded different meanings at different times. And blaming the Jews for anything—even the invention of a moral system widely thought to be mankind's highest accomplishment—was a danger he had to recognize. But then danger was his literary atmosphere, as provocation was his method. The grotesquely troublesome issue of the “will to power,” for which Safranski and many others continue to stand in ranks against him, might have been understood quite differently had Nietzsche used an alternative term, like “instinct for freedom,” which, as he explains at one point, indicates exactly the same psychological drive. But, as with his statements on Greek slavery, Nietzsche would not permit himself an easier, more digestible term, maybe because he grew up in a society in which swallowing just those sorts of terms had made him sick.

Perhaps the most important question about the influence of the life on the work is how much Nietzsche's ideas may be understood—rather like Freud's—as a response not only to the universal condition but to the specific, extraordinarily repressed conditions of his era. Many critics have complained that Nietzsche offered no new values to put in place of those that he aimed to destroy. Yet it could be argued that his master plan to spring the cultural trap and release the darker instincts—aggression, sex, power—would have not only lent these instincts honest shapes but restored the virtues that had been so long debased by the pretenses of bourgeois life. It is from the most powerful, and those most capable of evil, that Zarathustra demands, “I want the good from you.” It is their strength that makes their goodness valuable, because it is freely chosen.

Can goodness, in fact, arise from strength? Would it exist without coercion? This is the experiment from which generations of humanists have backed away; for Nietzsche, however, there was no goodness otherwise. Perhaps he offered no other values because he wanted no others; his task was to scald, scrape, and purify until the good ran true. “The genius of the heart,” Nietzsche wrote in “Beyond Good and Evil,” “divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and opaque ice.” Nietzsche was, in a sense, killing morality in order to save it.

Safranski, after damning Nietzsche's philosophy of power, calls the man himself a “genius of the heart”—referring to the forgiving, compassionate conduct of his life and the content of his letters, so at odds with the blazing persona of the work. (“Pity,” Nietzsche writes piteously, “has always been the major source of problems in my life,” and he goes on to lament “a soft spot that would have made any magnanimous Greek burst into laughter.”) In fact, Nietzsche confessed to feeling terror at the idea of compassion—a terror of being swamped by the suffering the world contained. At the end, in the Dostoyevskian scene in which he collapsed while trying to protect a horse, this is precisely what seems to have occurred. Despite the unceasing onslaught that the would-be warrior made on his moral constitution, it would not yield. Perhaps Nietzsche's fatal error, historically speaking, was his assumption that the morality of the civilization that he assaulted was equally indestructible. “Unfortunately,” Nietzsche complained of his epoch while looking into his own heart, “man is no longer evil enough.”

He did not live to learn otherwise. Those who carried Nietzsche's inheritance into the twentieth century have offered radically different responses to the revelation that man could bring the walls and towers of civilization crashing down. Freud, who through decades of work had recounted the psychological costs to individuals made sick by the cultural inhibition of powerful instincts, announced in 1930, in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” that the price was more than fair. Writing from a vantage point that feels like the very cliff edge from which Nietzsche soared and fell, Freud faced the future and warned that our civilization, however imperfect, represented nothing less than “the struggle for life of the human species,” and that this struggle might soon be lost. Three years later, Heidegger publicly greeted the triumph of Hitler's party, citing Nietzsche—”the last German philosopher to passionately seek God”—as an authority for God's death and for the welcome transformation at which the German nation then stood poised. Heidegger, who was neither to repent nor recant his early Nazi fervor, eventually altered his theological position in one regard. In an interview that he gave long after the war but ordered withheld from publication until his death, he announced that philosophy, after Nietzsche, could offer neither hope nor help for mankind's future. All we can do, he told a startled journalist, is to wait for a god to reappear. “Only a god,” he said, “can save us now.” ♦

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